A Josh Groban Love Story

Hey everyone, happy May! I hope your Spring is going as well as mine, now that Winter has finally decided to go home like that awkward guy at the party that just doesn’t seem to know when to leave. Unfortunately that annoying neighbor Summer is calling from next door already, asking if you want to hang out. No, Summer, I don’t want to hang out yet!

Anyway, moving past the weather, I’m sorry for my disappearance in the month of April, I spent most of it recovering from mono after a day in the ER not knowing why it hurt to breathe and why my heart rate and blood pressure were through the roof. That was fun.

Now that I’m back, and feeling mushy and nostalgic, I wanted to tell you a story from my mission and bring it to today. Disclaimer, I’m about to get disgustingly mushy, those with severe aversion to “Awwww,” should leave now.  ;)

I’m something of an eclectic music lover and honestly one of the hardest things about my mission in terms of the wacky rules was the restriction on what kind of music was allowed. Now, this isn’t something the church spells out explicitly in the white handbook, but most individual missions have their own rules and for most of my mission ours was pretty ambiguous as long as you could explain its existence to your zone leaders. A very popular one among a lot of missionaries, that I actually discovered through one of my first ZLs was Josh Groban’s album, “Closer.”

It’s actually a great album and something that I still pull up on my iTunes pretty regularly. I bought this album when I was about three months in to the two years and listened to it constantly. My family had bought me about twenty or so Mormon Tabernacle Choir albums, and they were really good, but eventually they get old and this one at least felt somewhat modern and closer to music I listened to back home.

I remember sitting in a little apartment in Murray, Utah, with my headphones in listening to this song. This all took place around the same time I had started reading the book that started me down the journey of accepting my sexual orientation. (See my second post I turned to track #5 and really listened to it for the first time and I was overcome with the beauty of the music and the lyrics. It is an incredible love song. Here’s a video for it, take a listen, and I’ll post the lyrics too.

“When You Say You Love Me”

Like the sound of silence calling,
I hear your voice and suddenly
I’m falling, lost in a dream.
Like the echoes of our souls are meeting,
You say those words and my heart stops beating.
I wonder what it means.
What could it be that comes over me?
At times I can’t move.
At times I can hardly breathe.When you say you love me
The world goes still, so still inside and
When you say you love me
For a moment, there’s no one else alive

You’re the one I’ve always thought of.
I don’t know how, but I feel sheltered in your love.
You’re where I belong.
And when you’re with me if I close my eyes,
There are times I swear I feel like I can fly
For a moment in time.
Somewhere between the Heavens and Earth ,
And frozen in time, Oh when you say those words.

When you say you love me
The world goes still, so still inside and
When you say you love me
For a moment, there’s no one else alive

And this journey that we’re on.
How far we’ve come and I celebrate every moment.
And when you say you love me,
That’s all you have to say.
I’ll always feel this way.

When you say you love me
The world goes still, so still inside and
When you say you love me
In that moment,I know why I’m alive

When you say you love me.
When you say you love me.
Do you know how I love you?

I sat back in my chair and let the music wash over me and felt the familiar mixture of a thrilling happiness and an aching pain as I imagined some future day when someone would be in my life that would fit this song. Looking back, it all seemed like a fantasy, a dream to pursue and to cling to, something that helped to push me forward each day. Seven years, and some change, after that day, and just over a year ago now, my dream became a reality. I met the man that I would be able to sing this song to and mean every word of it, and the last thirteen months have been the best of my life.

So, for the man that has stolen my heart, I’m adding this song to our growing list of ‘our songs.’ A list I know will continue to grow.

I love you.

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Spiritual Irony: The Faith-Shattering Testimony Meeting

Hello again! I seriously cannot believe it is October already. In planning for my blog posts I realized I started this blog by telling my story and need to get current before I get too topical…if that makes any sense.

So, to do that I suppose the natural order of things would be to return to what happened after I decided to leave BYUI. I left in April 2010.  Interest in school became kind of erratic in the next two years. I’m only now really going back to school in a serious way, and finally recapturing what I’d loved about school when separated from a religious context.

When I got home I went back to attending my local young single adult congregation and participated in an admittedly limited way. I think on some level I realized I was already losing the battle in my desire to remain in the church. I came out to my bishop, assuring him of my worthiness but worried about my faith and testimony. He gave me the book for the church’s addiction recovery program… yeah… That interview could have gone better.

While I became less active in my ward I actually increased my prayer and scripture study. I was determined to find answers that the church couldn’t or wouldn’t provide me. I was always disappointed listening to General Conference and frustrated by their inability to address much outside of, ‘Pray, read your scriptures, pay your tithing, etc, etc.” Also the more I read about the history of the church and conference talks, and from the scriptures was compounding the frustration.  I mean, I believed in a church which claimed direct, prophetic revelation from God. Joseph Smith and Brigham Young certainly never took half measures much of anything. Joseph once pointed at a rock in Missouri and said, and I’m paraphrasing, ‘That’s the altar where Adam prayed after being kicked out of the garden.’ Young talked about what kind of food we would be eating after the resurrection! Where was the revelation about why people are gay, about when the spirit enters the body, about if stillborn children will be resurrected or not? Those issues, God is silent on, but celestial cucumbers, that’s essential to our salvation?!

Then the straw that broke the camel’s back arrived. It stemmed from a General Conference talk from Boyd Packer, an Apostle in the LDS church, that he gave in October 2010. I don’t want to get too much into this talk right now because I think it could be an entire post in and of itself. It set off a firestorm among gay rights activists, Mormon and non, and I hear it caused quite a stir in Provo (site of BYU) and Salt Lake City.

It was in a reaction to that talk in my singles’ ward though that set off the final chain reaction. While sitting and listening to a Fast and Testimony Meeting (where members of the congregation are invited to the podium as they want to speak on their beliefs and ‘bare their testimony’) a guy in his early-twenties, who was in a leadership position, went up to the podium. After beginning the usual way, he took a tangent and began talking about how he had a friend in Provo and how they’d been discussing Packer’s talk and the resulting fallout. He went on to affirm Packer’s words about how God would never make someone gay, that it must have originated by some kind of choice, or as a consequence of some action taken during life. He was certain in his belief that the Atonement of Christ can and would fix anything, and that those who were struggling with this just simply were not trying hard enough.

I looked around and saw the huge number of people in the congregation nodding in rapt approval and agreement.

To them, and apparently so many LDS people, it’s just that simple. I hadn’t prayed hard enough, hadn’t fasted earnestly enough, and hadn’t searched the scriptures well enough to find the answer that would just make it all okay, that would make Christ’s Atonement finally work for me. Even at my most devout, doing all that I knew how to beg God’s intervention in my life, they were telling me that hadn’t been good enough, and that was that. Well… I certainly wasn’t going to rise above the level of faithfulness I had on my mission and just after, so I was doomed, according to this logic.

I suddenly and immediately had enough of it. Luckily he was the last person to speak before the meeting was closed. I walked out and that was the last time I attended church as a believer.

I drove to a large park near the church I attended and parked in my favorite spot overlooking this little lake and just sat there fuming, trying to relax and reflect. I stared at the beautiful sight and just contemplated everything, all of it seeming to rush through my head at once. I had recently come out to my non-member friends (another blog post to come) and I contrasted their love and acceptance with what I was hearing and feeling at church. I thought of my family and how they would react. How any decision I could make would affect them. Scriptures in my mind flooded to the surface like I was reading them out loud, in my head. Passages from Luke, and Genesis, from 2 Nephi and Alma, it was a very intense experience. I was angry, and frustrated, and hurt, and afraid, and sobbing like a mad man.

Despite all the emotional and irrational chaos in my head, one thought kept emerging from it. Despite every reason to stay, or go, despite my feelings on everything I had experienced, it stood alone. “I’m not happy.” The church culture and doctrine on homosexuality was choking me and I knew I had to leave. I said a prayer and told God what I had decided. I didn’t feel any doubt, any fear anymore, no hesitation and I made the decision firmly and committed to it.

Two things happened pretty simultaneously. The first was a huge realization of what I had just ‘given up.’ It cut straight to my heart with all the implications as if my head was warning me, “You know this is going to have a lot of social and familial repercussions, massive ones. Be sure this is what you want.”

The second came in the form of utter elation. You know that feeling when you eat your favorite flavor of ice cream, or the peace of reading a book during a thunderstorm, or the feeling of a high-speed dive on a roller coaster? It was like all of that at once. I knew immediately that I had made the right decision, and a massive, two-decade weight flew from my shoulders. Despite trials that would follow, so many things in my life started locking into place in a great way, helping give me confirmation that everything was going to be alright, eventually.

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Thoughts on Suicide

I really need to get back into this more than once a month, though I suppose I’m happy I’m doing this well. No blog before this has had this much success for me in terms of how often I write.  Some news outside of this blog for anyone interested: I’m back in school, taking two classes from my local community college, Comp 2 and IT Intro Networking. Both are going swimmingly, but have started to take up more of my time. Rehearsals also start back up tonight for the Heartland Men’s Chorus which I’m a member of. It’s going to be a very exciting, very busy fall. I can’t wait.

I’ve decided to take a break from the chronological narrative this post. My next in that vein is going to be about my main theological snag that ‘broke the camel’s back’ as it were and led me to leave the church. However, it is appropriately complex and deep, and I’m still working on it. I want to give it the justice and time it deserves. It’s important to me that people reading this understand all my thoughts in the clearest way I can give.

So instead I’m doing a topical post, which is something I’ll likely do more of in the future. When you come out to people, you get, understandably, a lot of questions. The first is always “When did you know?” One that invariably comes up is the depressing, “Did you ever consider suicide?” I’m lucky that, in the strictest sense, my answer is no.

I add that little caveat because though I never got anywhere close to doing action in taking my own life, there were periods on my mission where I wanted to die, and not because I was sad, depressed, or sinful, but because I was worthy, and I wanted to stay that way.

About four or five weeks into my mission I confessed to my Mission President my pre-mission transgressions that I should have taken care of, according to LDS theology, before my mission and before going through the temple. I sent letters to my Stake President, and Bishops to whom I had been less than truthful during my temple and missionary interview process, apologizing for my deceit. Once through the repentance process, I felt better about things because I had gone through the process taught to me and in my mind, things were back on track. I had done the remorse thing, the penance thing and lots of praying and asking forgiveness. A month or so later I felt worthy, happy, and gung ho about the mission again.

The oddest feeling struck me about six months into the mission. Everything was going rather well. I was in a good area, the people were nice, and the work was successful. We were walking down 13th East back down towards our apartment in Draper, for lunch. I want to say near 126th South? It’s been a while. It’s a decently busy area and a fun hill to drive down and offers a beautiful view of Corner Canyon near where we could see the Draper Temple being constructed.

We had decided to walk up the area to some of the neighborhoods in our area to go tracting for exercise and because we wanted to save on miles for the car. As we were walking down the hill, and I looked at the temple construction site, I had this weird thought cross my mind. ‘Given your same-gender attraction, this might be the best things get for your spiritually.’ I was a temple-worthy missionary. I was as close to pure as I was ever going to reach. I had given up my normal life to do God’s work to preach, there was no greater calling, right? I had the clear and distinct wish, almost a silent prayer, that a car would jump the curb and strike me dead at that moment so I could return to heaven, clean and pure, and not ‘ruin it’ for myself after the mission.

Think about that for a minute. It’s not technically a suicidal thought, as the definition of suicide implies intentional taking of one’s own life, but what would you call it? Spiritual death wish? It wasn’t isolated either, that thought would occur to me more times throughout the next eighteen months. What lead me to this?

It would be easy for me at this moment to blame the church and church teachings about worthiness, cleanliness, and the afterlife. Yet LDS belief about judgment and the afterlife is actually among the best in Christianity, in my opinion. Christ, the man who had suffered all, and knew my pain intimately, would be my judge. Someone with infinite knowledge of my life and my struggles, about my intentions and the nature of my heart, he would be the one to pass judgment on me, and I knew, according to church teachings, that I believed in a merciful, loving God and Savior. To throw the LDS church a bone, because some think that I’ve somehow made it my life’s mission to destroy it, as if I could, the church has some really great views about suicide and the afterlife, as much as is possible anyway.

Elder Jeffrey R. Holland, speaking at the funeral of a good friend who took his life, stated:
“God has said ‘You leave this to me.’ We’re not wise enough to make judgments in such matters. We don’t know enough. We did not walkwith Karl in that dark night. As much as we have known him and as much as we have loved him, we have not been able to imagine whatKarl must have been thinking. Because we can’t and because God can, he has said, ‘You leave this to me.’ And in such times when we do not know why this would happen, then we cling to what we do know. Itis a great rule of life: When we come to things we do not know and donot understand, we hold more firmly to things we do know and do understand. We know that God lives and loves Karl. We know that Christ went into that Garden and to the summit of Calvary, for Karl. We know that life is eternal. We know that the plan of salvationis perfect. We know that redemption, renewal, restoration and resurrection are great principles of the gospel, great images ofChrist. And so we don’t throw any rocks and we don’t fail to forgive. Inthis case, we probably aren’t able even to understand. We simply yield to God in this.”

Yet the simple fact remains, there is an epidemic of young, gay, Mormons who are committing suicide each year, added to the numbers of non-Mormon gay kids who are also taking their own lives. Then you have others like me, simply wishing they would die so as not to ‘ruin’ their worthiness.

My only conclusion I can come to is that theology plus culture is creating this problem. Life for many can be an isolated hell. Life just gets hard to deal with. When you add to that a teaching many in the LDS church believe as doctrine, that the lowest of the three Kingdoms of Glory (one of the three heavens people will go to after judgment day) is so beautiful and peaceful, is it a wonder some might see the afterlife as immensely preferable to this one? I’m afraid that so much emphasis in the LDS church on worthiness and working towards perfection creates psychological side effects for some people that are hard to identify and to combat.

I’m really just speculating. I don’t have any degrees in psychology, psychiatry, sociology, or even theology or philosophy. I just know that this is happening, and we need to watch what we say to young people in our lives. Remember that your children hear every word you say and internalize it as near absolute truth most of the time. Constantly tell all in your life that they are loved and wanted right here, that it really does get better. No matter how bad, or even good, life is, it can and will get better.

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Being Liberal at BYUI Part 2: Obama 2008

Previously on… can you tell I miss my regular TV shows?

Anyways, back to discussing the ultra-conservative atmosphere on campus at BYUI. Back when this was going on there was one main area everyone bottle necked because of construction. This was the Mainwaring Center (MC) where the bookstore is and the food court area. It was late September 2008. This was before all the spiffy new additions that are there now. Anyway, there were these two areas of the lower lobby that school clubs could reserve to hand out flyers or get signups for this, that and the other. One day I was walking through and saw this giant bulletin board that said “Campus Republicans – McCain 2008.”

One of the student volunteers must have noticed my eye roll from across the lobby area because he made a beeline for me. He was one of those guys with the “Hey, man,” attitude (the ‘bro’ stuff hadn’t reached Rexburg yet) with his very conservative LDS, middle of Idaho, football quarterback look about him. I’d be lying if I said he didn’t distract me a little bit from what he was actually saying, but when I got back around to paying attention I just politely said that I wasn’t interested. He asked if I just didn’t like politics. I shook my head and informed him that, no, I was interested in politics, but I was planning to vote for Barack Obama. I swear his eyes narrowed at me like I had become Korihor the anti-Christ. It would have been amusing if I’d been a spectator and not the source of the glaring. I didn’t want to get into a debate at the time, mostly because I still had half the campus to cross to get to my safe haven of wonderful people, the Snow Building. I apologized, sidestepped him and went on my way.

Thus began my exposure to the presiding cultural attitudes towards Obama at BYUI. Just like Prop 8, it was everywhere. If you wanted to derail and entire class away from a topic at hand, something I might have done on purpose once during a music theory class when my brain was hurting, all you had to do was bring up either Obama or Prop 8 and boom, class was over, political firestorm.

I found allies in unlikely places, one of my favorite professors, who had a stint as the Men’s Choir director, not to mention one hell of a French Horn player, had an Obama sign up in his office and I knew it was a safe place to discuss things with him on a political scale, which being in the leadership of the Choir I was able to do during that semester. Plenty of other teachers and students were able to be found if you knew what to look for. We were never so numerous, or annoying, just my opinion, as the Campus Conservatives. To give you a brief insight into their ridiculousness, they held “debates,” and even called them that…and didn’t bother to invite anyone of the opposing viewpoint. Utter hilarity.

I still remember the excitement the morning the election results came in and Obama had won. I felt elated and excited and posted about it on my Facebook page. Later that morning I received a text message from a rather closed-minded individual whose message was comprised almost exclusively of scriptures in the Book of Mormon talking about anti-Christs, the end of the world, and what will happen when the voice of the people choose evil over good…it was…special.

I received a few more of those kinds of messages on Facebook and in classes and from texts and was pretty baffled. I mean, I know people find politics very strong, but it was the first time I’d realized that people’s religion could dictate their politics and the reaction therein. It was fascinating and disheartening. The worst part was a story related to me by a professor, I think it was my Book of Mormon teacher at the time. He was a really good guy, great teacher, very religiously open-minded but very knowledgeable and had a strong testimony. His son was around second grade age and came home to tell his dad what he’d been told by another kid at school. This second grader had told this other second grader that Obama would need to be killed soon to fix the country. Fantastic, right? His parents, who I’m guessing he heard this from, would be so proud…

Now, let’s be clear, I’m not attributing any of this to church doctrine, necessarily, but I think we can all agree that church culture allows for and sometimes promotes this kind of thinking, and at least seemingly does very little to stop it.

I hope this gave you an idea of the culture that surrounded me in Rexburg as I began the fledgling thoughts to take my life in a different direction.

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At ‘The Lord’s University’

I first need to apologize about the lapse in writing these past weeks. I’ve been having an internal debate on the direction to take this blog and got mired in that and distracted long enough to keep myself from writing. I’ve decided, for now, to follow along with my current motion and just keep it linear and autobiographical unless something strikes me. So, that little bit of unrelated discussion aside, on with the meat of the post.

When last we left him, our intrepid hero was embarking on a deadly, covert mission to Rexburg, Idaho. (Sorry, I’ve always wanted to write something like that.)

Goofiness aside, as mentioned in my last post, I ran to college less than three months after returning to my hometown of Kansas City. I wanted to keep up the ‘spiritual high’ and ‘positive atmosphere’ of the mission as long as possible, and what better place to do that than at a Mormon college?

So I was off to the oft-frigid land of Rexburg, sometimes colloquially named Iceburg. College, by and large, was a great place for me, especially initially. I was able to be with friends from my mission, and made great new friends, most of which are still close to my heart, and connected via internet and online video games, if now physically distant today. Far and away the best part of the college courses themselves was singing in the BYU-Idaho Collegiate Singers and the Men’s Chorus. Not only from the friendship and camaraderie that I was able to forge, but the high quality of musicianship, hard work and the amazing music we were able to make. I don’t know that I’ll ever be able to sing with a group at those levels again.

My issues and problems with this church owned and church run school, to be fair, might not be unique to LDS schools. All the same, college did very little to positively reinforce my view of mainstream Mormonism and the church in general. Yes I understand it was my choice to go there, but I constantly chafed at the immature honor code. Why are the commandments, and the eternal judgment and justice of God, not good enough? What about shorts, flip flops, goatees, skinny jeans, or a five o’clock shadow are immoral? Granted, it would seem that the Testing Center were the only ones with a crusade to enforce these ‘higher laws.’ I was never asked by a teacher to leave class because in my groggy rush to a 7:45 class I had forgotten to shave, which was a semi-regular occurrence. The whole situation makes me think of that scene in the film Spartacus, “ Do you consider the eating of oysters to be moral and the eating of snails to be immoral?” It all made very little sense to me, but I wore pants to school when it was hot and shaved off my goatee anyway because that was the ‘code,’ and until it was changed, that’s what I had agreed to.

The core issue that really chafed me the most was the main problem inherent with being at a church school. When I was perfectly happy with everything and active in church it wasn’t a problem at all. However, the flip side of that coin caused serious issues when I started having disaffection with the church, which started around 2009. When my activity started faltering, I was called in for an interview with my school congregation’s bishop. With no concern as to the causes or root problems I was facing, he warned that if my attendance didn’t pick up I would be faced with losing my ecclesiastical endorsement, which is a requirement for enrolling in classes and is renewed annually, but which a school bishop can pull at any time for any reason he sees fit. This would have effectively halted and possibly endangered my academic progress. Needless to say the meeting was less than inspiring and I left feeling worse about both school and the church.

To back up a little, I’ll share a phrase I heard from a favorite mission leader, and fellow missionary, from my mission. “Mormons (and you could probably insert many people of religious influence here) are like dung. Spread around they have the possibility of nurturing, fostering growth and being a social fertilizer. Grouped in a clump, they just stink.” Not wanting to get into the debate on the positives or negatives of religion in general, which might be a fun topic for a later post, I use this quote to illustrate one of my issues that first began my disaffection with the church. For a church that claims to be the one and only true church, touting the fullness of the restored gospel and all the saving ordinances, the church produces some of the most backwards, unintelligent, judgmental, cruel, ignorant, and harmful human beings I have had the displeasure of meeting.

Having grown up in “the mission field” I was not exposed to many of the more kooky, fringe members of the church, though I certainly knew they existed. Most of them were all older than me and I could dismiss their relative kookiness to age and senility. However, one of the problems when you are attending a school where 99% of the school’s student body are active, ecclesiastically endorsed members of the LDS church, you find that you are surrounded by the possibility of hundreds of crazy people.

This craziness was manifest in a lot of different ways. One example was how an entire hour and a half religion class was derailed by a discussion of the evils of Facebook. Obviously most of the class, those that were even mentally present enough to care to participate, were divided on the issue. You see, up to this point, the IT policy of the school had blocked Facebook, along with plenty of other harmless sites, from being accessed on the school network for bandwidth issues. When the school underwent a much needed upgrade to their IT infrastructure, many of those restrictions were lifted because it had become a non issue. The reason I know this is because my networking professor at the time was part of that project and was using it to help teach us, through real application, about network design, information flow, etc. Yet this girl student in my religion class was fully and seriously bothered that President Clark (the school’s president) had “given into the pressure of ‘the world’” and how horrible it was. I’m not even joking. This was one of the more comical and benign shows of the craziness I, or any attendee of the school, could relate to you. I could write pages and pages of what it was like to be a democrat at this school during the 2008 Presidential Election…

Back to the beginnings of my disaffection. While I was at the time dedicated to the ultimately morose notion of living a celibate life and finding joy in other areas, I distinctly remember the first time I decided to skip church because I was just so fed up with it. After the fifth straight week where the two main speakers in sacrament meeting were an engaged couple asked specifically to talk about how they met, how happy they were, and how exciting their marriage plans were, rather than any doctrinal point, I’d had enough. My church attendance became sporadic and based on if I was required to teach Sunday School that week.

Fast forward back to my meeting with the bishop. I knew that the system was in place to demonstrate attendance over participation or actual spiritual nourishment. With our meeting block reversed I would go to Elder’s Quorum and Sunday School first, sign my name on both role lists, sitting in the back of the room with a book, homework, or playing on my iPod and not participating in any way unless the topic was somewhat interesting. Then after making sure I was seen by a member of the bishopric I would leave and skip sacrament meeting, maybe staying for all three meetings once a month or so. So it was that I became what a few of my friends and I refer to as ‘spiritually less-active,’ something that is far more common at “The Lord’s University” than a true believer would want to accept.

This disaffection eventually led to interference with my actual school work, so I made plans to move back home to Kansas City, the first baby steps towards leaving the church behind, and towards the realization of the doctrinal issues and snags I ended up finally having to face.

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Pray It Away…

This will be the first of my topics that is a little more difficult for members of the LDS Church and their stance on this issue. My intent, however, is to do as much explaining as I can from my experience and not try to attack what the church teaches so much as explain why I feel it didn’t work for me.

Mormons believe in a powerful form of prayer, and fasting, and personal miracles. Countless stories are taught to you from scripture and you hear them monthly from testimony meetings (where individual members can speak freely from the podium on Sundays). The thought is that if you pray enough, and fast with real intent (fasting is going without food or drink for two meals or 24 hours, beginning and ending with a prayer, as a sign of personal sacrifice and dedication to show the Lord that your request is truly genuine), and do service, and focus on others, through the power of Christ’s Atonement, you will overcome any trial you’ve been given. Stories abound of people having their temptation for addictions completely removed overnight, of sick family members being healed, of countless types of miracles wrought in the lives of the faithful.

As a missionary it is expected even more so. You are the Lord’s representative, duly called and appointed to do his work and to act as he would on his behalf. You carry the mantle of an Elder of God’s Priesthood, a messenger with the authority of God to call people to repentance, to gather the lost, to bring them to Zion. I knew, on some deep level, that if I was going to defeat this trial of mine, of homosexuality, that it would happen on my mission through dedicated service, prayer, and fasting.

I dedicated my entire mission to this one purpose. Secretly, of course, though I confided in my Mission President and a mission friends along the way.  Every fast I did was dedicated to this purpose. Every personal prayer, morning and night, on my knees, was wrestling and pleading with God to change me, to remove this trial from me, to make me a more mighty instrument in his hand.

Halfway into my two years, hopeful zeal and determination turned to despair as I noticed no difference, felt no change, witnessed no miraculous healing. My personal prayers became longer and longer. I would pray into the night, when I knew my companion was asleep. Tears would flow freely as my pleading turned to begging, repeating the same words over and over again, “Please, Father, please. I know you can do anything, that you are all powerful, please take this away. Please, please, please…” These whispered words and tears became my nightly ritual. Every night the same pattern would follow, the same words, the same feeling of failure, of hopelessness, of anguish.

I became more desperate, feeling though I wasn’t doing enough. I would go into the bathroom and turn on the shower so my companion couldn’t hear, kneel on the hard floor and cry out, pray louder, demanding that God hear me and give me an answer. No change. I scoured the scriptures and the missionary manuals, determined to find answers. I read about the powerful change of heart in the wicked Zeezrom, the miraculous conversion of Paul, and so many other powerful stories. I studied everything I could about the Atonement and the infinite and eternal power it had to change anyone’s life.

Near the end of my mission, two years of dedicating hours and hours each day to this, all of my efforts seemed to come to nothing. My prayers became less and less fervent, as I accepted a growing feeling that I was not going to change, and I suddenly had to figure out what that was going to mean. After my mission was concluded and I returned home, I immediately set off for BYU-Idaho not even two months after my return. It was after going to college that statements from General Authorities started to come out about the subject, or at least that I noticed. There was a marked shift in tone when dealing with these issues in General Conference.  For instance, President Spencer W. Kimball said this in November 1980:

“The unholy transgression of homosexuality is either rapidly growing or tolerance is giving it wider publicity. If one has such desires and tendencies, he overcomes them the same as if he had the urge toward petting or fornication or adultery. The Lord condemns and forbids this practice with a vigor equal to his condemnation of adultery and other such sex acts. And the Church will excommunicate as readily any unrepentant addict.”

A very different tone comes from Elder Jeffrey R. Holland in 2007:

“Through the exercise of faith, individual effort, and reliance upon the power of the Atonement, some may resolve same-gender attraction in mortality and marry. Others, however, may never be free of same-gender attraction in this life.

As fellow Church members, families, and friends, we need to recognize that those attracted to the same gender face some unique restrictions regarding expression of their feelings. While same-gender attraction is real, there must be no physical expression of this attraction. The desire for physical gratification does not authorize immorality by anyone. Such feelings can be powerful, but they are never so strong as to deprive anyone of the freedom to choose worthy conduct.”

I knew from my experience and from the feelings I got when I prayed that I was not going to change. I knew at that time I faced a major decision. Remain in the church and remain celibate and alone, most likely for the rest of my life, or leave the church and everything that entails. The decision I made at that time was the former. I would focus my life on school, my career, singing, my friends, my future career, being a good brother and a good uncle and son, and try to put on a good face while denying that part of myself and its expression. Though I had no idea the challenges it would bring at an LDS college until a year or so later.

Looking back on this and what I went through, knowing myself now the way I do and the trials I’ve passed through to get where I am, I no longer support any methods to try to change someone’s sexuality. I feel it is incredibly unhealthy, psychologically, and will only lead to guilt and anguish should the change not come. In my opinion, those who have experienced change in their life most likely fell somewhere into the spectrum of bisexuality and were able to focus on their attraction to women and subdue their attraction for men. I am obviously not a professional, I can only speak from experience and opinion. All I know is that as soon as I accepted myself for exactly who I am, and what that meant in my life, a huge weight lifted off of my shoulders and everything in my personal life began to lock into place.

I do not want to encourage anyone to take any specific actions. Each person’s life and experiences are incredibly unique. I only encourage happiness, and the pursuit of it in your life. If you are happy as a gay person in the church, really and truly happy, you should stay there. My path eventually led me in a different direction.

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My Best Two Years

“Called to Serve the Salt Lake South Mission
Jello, roast beef, mashed potatoes too!”
Those are the beginning words of a joking ‘mission theme’ that the elders of my mission would sing to each other, certainly out of earshot of the mission president. I was called to, where I served honorably for two years, the Utah Salt Lake City South Mission. It’s funny, perhaps not humorous as much as just strange, but my mission, in a way, was exactly what everyone told me it would be. It changed everything for me. An LDS mission brought me out of my social shell, forced me to talk with complete strangers, get along with even stranger missionary companions, and brought a lot of personal strength while demolishing a bit of my naivety about the world.

I was told that my mission would forever be a source of strength, a pillar I could rely on the rest of my life. To be honest that’s still entirely true to this day. My mission was a huge turning point in my life, and psychological well being. Somewhere around five or six months into my mission, I was serving in the Midvale, UT, area. My last companion had just been emergency transferred because of inappropriate relations with a single mother in the area, something I didn’t find out about until months later. The area was in shambles, we had very few investigators, none that were progressing. My new companion was someone who had a reputation in the mission for being an amazing scriptorian, excellent with words and a great teacher. He proved to be all of these things. He also proved to be someone that I was unable to not butt heads with. However he also proved to be someone who to this day has earned great deal of respect from me.

On one of our preparation days (once a week missionaries get half of a day ‘off’ to do laundry, go shopping, play games and otherwise ‘unwind’ to prepare for the coming week, ours was on Tuesdays) we were shopping at Deseret Book (an LDS bookstore) when a book at the bottom of one of the shelves caught my attention. To be honest it caught my initial attention because the guy on the cover was attractive. I reached down to pick it up and read the title, “In Quiet Desperation: Understanding the Challenge of Same-gender Attraction.”

I stared at the book cover for a good minute or two, unable to believe what I was seeing. Mormons didn’t talk about this subject, certainly not in a way that would seek any kind of ‘understanding.’ I looked around, suddenly afraid someone would see me, a missionary with name tag and all, looking at a book that had to deal with homosexuality. I read the back of the book and I got more and more intrigued. I sandwiched the book between two other books I was buying and mustered up the courage to go to the counter. The nice, older lady at the counter didn’t seem to notice anything strange about the book I was buying, or if she did, she didn’t say anything about. I’ll love her forever for that.

I took the book home and absolutely devoured it. I read it all the rest of our P-day, read it during dinner, and read it into the night when our appointments were done for the night. I read more in the morning during personal study, during breakfast and lunch, in every spare moment. My companion had to have taken a look at the book at some point and knew what it was about. I made up some flimsy story about it being for a good friend back home that I have to imagine he saw right through. The amazing thing, though, is that he let me have my space and read to my heart’s content. I will always respect and appreciate how he handled that situation, knowing how much we often disagreed or bickered, when it mattered he did the truly Christlike thing. He could have spread rumors throughout the mission, and to my knowledge he never did.

I must have read the book four or five times in the first three days of owning it. I simply couldn’t put it down, couldn’t keep myself from it. The book is told in two parts. The first part is written by the parents of a gay man in Salt Lake City who killed himself on the steps to his church building and had left his parents a note explaining his struggles with homosexuality. The parents, mostly the mother, recount their story and the process they went through to deal with it.

The second part of the book is written by a young, gay man, returned missionary and active member of the church. He spent quite a few chapters dissecting homosexuality through the eyes of actual church doctrine, not member-driven fear and rhetoric. He talked about the scriptures of Paul, the teachings in Leviticus and how the Plan of Salvation could be applied to gay people.

While there are a few things in this book that I now disagree with, I still keep it on my bookshelf at home because it marked the first moment in my life when I felt that I wasn’t broken, that I wasn’t evil, that this was simply another part of me. One of the best object lessons the parents talked about in the book that they would use with people is that they would hold a piece of paper right in front of someone’s eyes and ask them what they could see. Obviously the paper filled every portion of their vision. When the paper was pulled away, the rest of the world came into focus, allowing the young man to see all the rest of the room they were in.

They helped me to understand that homosexuality is just a word that describes one aspect of my being. An important one, true, but just a part. I’m not first and foremost a gay man, or at least not just a gay man. I was a brother, a son, an uncle, a Christian, a temple-worthy member, a nerd, a gamer, an optimist, a Jayhawks fan, an avid reader, a writer, a musician, a student, and a human being, who also happens to be gay.

To say this changed my life is an understatement. Of course I had challenges after this, but this was the beginning of the journey back to self-love, self-confidence, and self-respect.

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Starting with Me

They say the journey of a thousand miles begins with a single step, yet that first step is always the most daunting. I suppose when making a blog about my story in leaving the LDS church and the reasons behind it, it would be best to start with a little bit about who I am, and how I came to be who I am today.

As of this entry, I am a 26 year old gay man living in the greater Kansas City area. I am no longer active in the Mormon church and do not consider myself a member, but am still technically a member, meaning my name is still on the records of the church.

I was born in Sandy, Utah, at Alta View Hospital, in September of 1985 — an awesome birth year in my opinion — to two incredible parents, to be the youngest of four children. I have an older brother who is a little over three years older than me, and two sisters who are nine and seven years older than me. I was born into the Mormon church, both of my parents having been married in the Manti Temple, making me what is considered a ‘child of record’ in the church. This means that I was on the records of the church from my birth. In a decision I regularly thank my parents for, my Dad took a job that moved our family to Kansas City when I was still just two years old, a city that I love to this day and where I hope to spend my life.

From everyone else’s perspective I probably seemed to have had a very typical Mormon upbringing and childhood. I was baptized at age 8, became a deacon, teacher and priest at the appropriate ages. I held various callings in my teens including president of the teacher’s quorum, priest’s quorum first assistant, and even a stake youth representative, in which I helped to plan, and teach at, a youth conference. I went to early morning seminary, though I stopped going my senior year because of early morning school commitments and thus never graduated. I gave a number of talks in church, that were very well received by the members who talked to me afterwards. I would request the opportunity, even, of my Bishopric (the bishop and his two counselors) because I enjoyed the preparation and delivering of talks. I went to stake dances, participated in mutual (youthgroup), scouting, received a patriarchal blessing, and did everything I was instructed to do as I prepared to serve a full-time mission at age 19. I was, by all accounts, a good, happy, Mormon kid.

The problem was, I was not happy. I was not good, at least I didn’t view myself that way. I had a problem. A huge problem that I didn’t know how to deal with.

When I was in sixth grade I was the target of a large amount of teasing, something that followed me through the end of middle school (eighth grade). I attended Pembroke Hill at the time, and small class sizes and differences in religion and socioeconomic status will cause a number of issues with elementary and middle school aged kids. Strangely enough I was never teased about my religion, or about the fact that my parents weren’t as rich as the kids who I went to school with. Kids started leaving notes in my locker calling me gay, whispering about me as I walked past in the halls, and outright making fun of me during classes, lunch time, basically whenever the moment struck them.

At the time I didn’t even know what ‘gay’ meant. I just knew I was being called it and that these kids didn’t like it. Eventually I would connect it with the attraction that I started to develop in my male classmates, and the realization that my other male classmates were different than me. They were all talking about girls in the way I was feeling about them. Slowly I began to understand I was different than them, but that it was something I not only couldn’t admit or act on, I had to deny it and do my best to try to tell them they were wrong. I spent all of sixth through eighth grade trying to be invisible and created a giant social shell to hide in.

I remember in an early Sunday School class the topic once came up. I had to have been around 14 or so. I spoke up, naively, saying that gay people were born that way. I had certainly never chosen to have these feelings. I was instantly, and vehemently, corrected by one of the girls in my class, around my same age. I remember it vividly, I still remember which classroom in that church building it was in. She looked very sternly at me and said, “No, Trent, it’s a choice. Gay people choose to be that way, and God doesn’t like it.” The teacher, who’s name I still remember, must have felt like that just about covered it, so we moved on with the rest of the lesson.

This provided me with my first theological crisis. I certainly had no memory of choosing to be gay. If I had chosen it, how could I go about unchoosing it? I didn’t want to be this way. If I didn’t remember choosing it, did I choose it when I was really young somehow? Was it a consequence of a choice made when I was really young? That’s the theory that stuck in my head. I had done something, either in the earliest part of my life, or perhaps even in the pre-earth life, to make God mad at me. This was my punishment. I was broken. I was an abomination before God, and he hated me for being the way I was. I hated myself too. I hated myself for doing whatever it was that caused this, for ruining my life before it had even begun.

This feeling was reiterated by the many things I heard from Priesthood leaders, Sunday School teachers, others in the church, from talks and conversations, and even though they didn’t know they were doing it, my parents and family. The sentiment was just so commonplace. It was just the way it was, no one really questioned it, it just was. This was how I viewed myself until I was about a quarter of the way through my mission, when I read a book that changed my life.

This is getting long, so I’ll start there with my next entry. Please feel free to leave comments or questions below, I’ll definitely respond or address them in my next entry.

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Welcome, and Disclaimer

***DISCLAIMER*** Before reading any of the posts below, click and read the About page, linked to at the very top of this page. Read on at your own discretion.

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